My goal is to become a chef in the health care sector, specifically elder care/nursing homes, but I am not opposed to other options in that field. I'm not as motivated to go into the traditional restaurant business, long term, but I am aware that may be a necessity for experience building.

I live in the U.S. (California) right now, and I'm looking to relocate/migrate to either Western Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. The aforementioned schools are closest to where I currently live. Junior/Community colleges in my state (California) are cutting programs left and right due to tremendous budget cuts year after year. Plus the time frame in which it would take to complete a culinary program would be at least 2 years. That's a bit longer than I care to spend at this point in my life.

I would appreciate any comments on the above listed schools if anyone has any knowledge of them, or a suggestion on where to find some reviews. I've had little to no luck on Google. Most of the results from Google leads me back to this forum! (Perhaps for good reason, I hope).

I'm in agreement with the two above. I went to VCC (Vancouver Community College) albeit under an apprenticeship program rather than the 12 month program and it was probably the best decision I made school-wise.

I have an apprentice working for me now who was offered a 3000$ scholarship to Pacific Institute and I convinced her to turn it down because it wouldn't even make a dent in the obscene cost of the program. For the entire 3000$ scholarship you could do almost the entire VCC program and walk out with a Red Seal from an internationally recognized school.

Uh... ITA is responsible for the red seal program and subesequent desigation, not the school.

Things have changed since late 2009,and "Red Seal" is finally a benchmark worthy of recognition. There is now, cook 1, cook 2 and cook three designations, with only cook 3 and "outside challangers" able to write the red seal test and to cook the new practical red seal cooking portion of the test . Cook 1 entails aprox 3mths of school/classroom time and then a certain amount of time in the industry (think it's 600 or 800 hrs) before applying for cook 2 is possible.

...."This whole reality thing is really not what I expected it would be"......